Re: [tied] Satem shift

I would not expect shared phonological innovations of a non-trivial kind connecting Greek with the Satem group, because I don't believe these languages form a valid genetic grouping. There are, however, similarities pointing to an old Sprachbund relationship involving Greek (+ Phrygian), Indo-Iranian, Armenian and (at least in some respects) the ancestor of Albanian. To name a few: the use of the augment *e with the preterite, prohibitive *me:, shared lexical items and poetic formulas.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: rao.3@...

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2001 1:43 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Satem shift

--- In cybalist@......, "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@......> wrote: >(despite the numerous affinities between Greek and Indo-Iranian > and Armenian One hears this often, but what exactly are these affinities that are not shared archaisms? [Phonologically, reflexes of short vocalic nasals comes to mind. Morphological affinities often claimed look shaky when investigated closely. Eg, a system of moods for each of present, aorist and perfect, posited for Vedic has no syntactic basis. Distributionally too, it looks fishy: There are few sigmatic imperatives, and what there are are transfer stems; sigmatic optatives are few, limited to the middle (root optatives are much more common in active) and where relevant contain the extra s of the precative; sigmatic subjunctives are more common but in Greek gave rise to the future. It looks like Indic simply replaced the root stem used in moods in PIE (as per general opinion) by the present stem, with a short period of experimentation that went nowhere).]